Statewide County HI Archives News.....Letters of Isabella L. Bird Bishop. - Part 28: Letter # XVII. November 11, 2008
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Darlene E. Kelley donkeyskid@msn.com November 16, 2008, 9:08 am
Keepers Of The Culture, A Study In Time Of The Hawaiian Islands November 11, 2008
Contributed for use in
USGenWeb Archives
by Darlene E, Kelley
donkeyskid@msn.com
November 11, 2008
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Historical Collections of Hawai'i
Keepers of the Culture
A Study in Time, of the Hawai'ian Islands
Isabella L. Bird Bishop Letters
" Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the
Sandwich Islands. "
Letter # XVII
Transcribed.
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Letter # XVII
" Six Months Among the Palm groves, Coral Reefs,and Volcanoes of the
Sandwich Islands "
STR. KILAUEA
......I have been spending the day at Lahaina on Maui, on my way from
Kawaihae to Honolulu. Lahainia is thoroughly beautiful and tropical
looking, with its white latticed houses peeping out from under coco
palms, breadfruit, candlenut, tamarinds, mangoes, bananas and oranges,
with the brilliant green of a narrow strip of sugar-cane for a
background, and above, the flushed mountains of Eeka, riven here and
there by cool green chasms, rise to a height of 6000 feet. Beautiful
Lahhaina ! It is an oasis in a dazzling desert, straggling for nearly
two miles along the shore, but compressed into a width of a half mile.
It was a great missioary centre, as well as a great whaling station, but
the whalers have deserted it, and missions are represented now only by
the seminary of Lahainaluna on the hillside. An od palace, the remains
of fort, a custom house, and a native church are the most conspicuous
buildings. The stores ad dwellings of the foreign residents are
scattered along the shore, and the light frame house, with its green
veandah, buried amid gorgeous exotics and shaded by candlenut and
breadfruit, looks as seemly and in keeping as in far off Massachusetts,
under hickor and elm. The grass houses of the natives cluster along the
waters' edge, or in lanes dark with mangoes and bananas, and fragrant
with gardenia fringing the cane fields. These, with adobe houses and
walls, the flush of the soil, the guady dresses of the natives, the
masses of brilliant exotics, the intense blue of the sea, and the dry
blaze of the tropical heat, give a decided individuality to the capital
of Maui. The heat of Lahaina is a dry, robust, bracing, joyous heat, The
mercury stood at 80 degrees, the usual temperature of the " flare " or
sea level on the leeward side of the islands; but I strolled through the
cane fields and among the glaring beach without suffering the least
inconvenience from the sun, and found the unusual precaution of a white
unbrella perfectly needless.
The beach is formed of pure white broken coral; the sea is blue with the
calm, pure blue of turquose, but crystalline in its purity, and breaks
for ever over the environing coral reef with a low deep music. Blue
water stretched to the far horizon, the sky was blazing blue, the
leafage was almost dazzling to the eye, the mountainous island of
Molokai floated like a great blue morning glory on the yet bluer sea; a
sweet, soft breeze rustled through the palms, lazy ripples plashed
lightly on the sand; humanity basked, flower-clad, in sunny indolence;
everything was redundant, fervid, beautiful. How can I make you realize
the glorous, bountiful, sun-steeped tropics under our cold grey skies,
and amidst our pale, monotonous, lustreless greens ?
Yet Molokai is only enchanting in the distance, for its blue petals
enfold 400 lepers doomed to endless isolation, and 300 more are shortly
to be weeded out and sent thither. In to-day's paper appeared the
painful notice, " All lepers are required to report themselves to the
Government health officer within fourteen days from this date for
inspection, and final banishment to Molokai." It is hoped that leprosy
may be "stamped out" by these stringent measures, but the leprous taint
must be strong in many families, and the social, gregarious natives
smoke each other's pipes and wear each other's clothes, and either from
fatalism or ignorance have disregarded all precautions regarding thie
woeful disease; and now that measures are being taken for the isolation
of lepers, they are concealing them under mats and in caves and woods.
This forlorn malady. called here Chinese leprosy, in the cases I have
seen, confers nothing of the white, scaly look attributed to Syrian
leprosy; but the face is red, puffed, bloated, and shining, and the eyes
glazed, and I am told that in an advanced stage the swollen limbs decay
an drop off. It is a fresh item of the infinate curse which has come
upon this race, and with Molokai in sight the Hesperids vanished, and I
cease to believe that the Fortunate Islands exist here or elsewhere on
this waery earth.
My destination was the industrial training and boarding school for
girls, taught and superintended by two English ladies of Miss Sellon's
sisterhood. Sisters Mary Clara and Phoebe; and I found it buried under
the shade of the finest candlenut trees I have yet seen. A rude wooden
cross in front is a touching and fitting emblem of the Saviour, for whom
these pious women have sacrificed friends,sympathy, and the social
intercourse and amenities which are within daily reach of our workers at
home. The large house, whch is either plastered stone or adobe, contains
the dormitories, visitor's room. and oratory, and three houses at the
back, all densly shaded, are used as schoolroom, cook house, laundry,
and refectory. There is a playground under some fine tamarind trees, and
an adobe wall encloses, without scheduling, the whole. The visitor's
room is about twelve feet by eight feet, very bare, with a deal table
and three chairs in it, but it was vacant, and I crossed to the large,
shady, airy schoolroom, where I found the senior sister engaged in
teaching, whle the junior was busy in the cookhouse. These ladies in
eight years have never left Lahaina. Other people may think it necessary
to leave its broiling heat and seek health and recreation on the
mountains, but their work has left them no leisure, and their zeal no
desire, for a holiday. A very solid, careful English education is given
hre, as well as a thorough training in all housewifely arts, and in the
more important matters of modest dress and deportment, and propriety in
language. There are thirty-seven boarders, native and half-native, and
mixed native and chinese, between the age of four and eighteen. They
provide their own clothes, beds, and bedding, and I think, pay forty
dollars a year. The capitation of grant from theGovernment fortwo years
was 2325 dollars. Sister Phoebe was my cicerone, and I owe her one of
the pleasantest days I have spent on the islands. The elder Sister is in
middle life; but though fragile-looking, has a pure complexion and a
lovely countenance; the younger is scarcely middle-aged, one of the
brightest, bonniest, sweetest-looking women I ever saw, with fun dancing
in her eyes and round the corners of her mouth; yet the regnant
expression on both faces was serinity, asthough they had attained to "
the look which looketh kindly, and the wisdom which looketh soberly on
all things."
I never saw such a mirthful-looking set of girls. Some were cooking the
dinner, some ironing, others reading English aloud; but each occupation
seemed a pastime, and whenever they spoke to the Sisters , they clung
about them as if they were their mothers. I heard them read the Bible
and an historical lesson, as well as play on a piano and sing, and they
wrote some very difficult passages from dictation without any errors,
and in a flowing, legible handwriting that I am disposed to envy. Their
accnt and intonation were pleasing, and there was a briskness and
emulation about their style of answering questions, rarely found in
country schools with us, signiicant of intelligence and good teaching.
All but the younger girls spoke English as fluently as Hawaiian. I
cannot convey a notion of the blitheness and independence of manner of
these children. To say that they were free and easy would be wrong; it
was rather the manner of very frolicsome daughters to very indulgent
mothers or aunts. It was a family manner rather than a school manner,
and the rule is obviously one of love. The Sisters are very wise in
adapting their discipline to the native character and circumstances. The
rigidity which is customary in simular institutions at home would be out
of place, as well as fatal here, and would untimatey lead to rebound of
a most injurious description Strict obedience is of course required, but
the rules are few and lenient, and there is no more pressure of
disipline than in a well-ordered family. The native amusements generally
are objectionable, but Hawaiians are a dancing people, and will dance,
or else indulge in less innocent pasttimes; so the Sisters have taught
them various English dances, and I never saw any thing prettier or more
graceful than their style of dancing. There is no uniform dress. The
girls were pretty print frocks, made in the English style, and several
of them wore the hibiscus in ther shining hair. Some of the older girls
were beautiful in face as well as graceful in figure, but there was a
snaky undulation
about their movements which I never saw among Europeans. All looked
bubbling over with fun and frolic, and there was a refinement and
intelligence abiut their expression which contrast favourly with that of
the ordinary female face on the islands.
There are two dormitories, excellently ventilated, with a four-post bed,
with mosquito-bars, for esch girl, and the beds were covered with those
brillant colured quilts inwhich the natives delight, and in which they
exercise considerable ingenuity as well as individuality of taste. One
Sister sleeps in each doemitory, and these highly educated and refined
women hve no place of retirement except a very plain oratory; and having
taken the vow of pverty, they have of course no possessions, none of the
books, pictures, and knick-knacks wherewith others adorn their
surroundings. Their whole lives, with the exception of the time passed
in the oratory, are spent with the girls, and in visiting the afflicted
at their homes, and this through eight blazing years, with the mercury
always at 80 degress.
The Hawaiian women have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if
there is to be any future for this race it must coe through a higher
morality. Consequently the removal of these girls fom evil and impure
surroundings, the placing them under the happiest influences in favour
of purity and goodness, the forming and fostering of industrious and
housewifely habits, and the raising them in their occupations and
amuseents above those which are natural to their race, are in themselves
a noble, and in some degree, a hopeful work, but it admits of neither
pause nor relaxation. Those who carry it on are truly " the loest in the
meanest task," for they have undertaken not only the superintendece o
mnial work ( so called), but te work itself, in teaching by example and
instruction the womanly industries of home. They have no society, until
lately, no regular Liturgical worship, and of necessity a very
infrequent celebration of the Holy Communion; and they have undergone
the trail which arose very naturally out of the ecclesiastical
relations of the American missionaries, of eing regared as eneies, or at
least dangerous interlopers, by the excellant men who have long resided
on te islands as Christian teachers, and with whose views on such
matters as dress and recreation their own are somewhat at varience . In
the first instance, the habit they wore, their designations, thepresence
of Miss Sellon, the fame of whose Ritualistic tendencies had reached the
islands, and their manifest connection with a section of the English
Church which is regaarded herewith peculiar disfavour, rosed a strongly
antagonistic feeling regarding their work and the drift of their
religious teching. They are not connected with what is known at home as
the " Honolulu Mission."
[ It gives me pleasure to add tat the Sisters have lived down this very
natural distrust, and that in a subsequent residence of five months on
the ilands, I have never heard but one opinion, and that of the most
favourable kind, regarding the Lahaina School, and te excellenceand
wisdom of the manner in which it is conducted. I have been told by many
who on most points are quite out of sympathy with the Sisters, not only
that their work is recognized as a most valuable agency, but that their
influence has come to be regarded as among the chiefest of the blessings
of Lahaina. ]
I.L.B.
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